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Two families, unconcerned with dignity. The Hathaways are farmers, in the English county of Warwickshire, with close ties to the land—some would say too close, at least in the case of Agnes, a young woman so eccentrically at one with nature that she is rumored to have been born of a forest witch. The Shakespeares are led by a glover, whose business has seen better days. His eldest son—William, of course, though he is not immediately identified as such—defrays his father’s debts by tutoring Agnes’s younger brothers in Latin, an arrangement that begets many reversals of fortune. Agnes and William fall in love; conceive a daughter, named Susanna; and marry, over the protests of their families. A few years later, Agnes bears twins, Hamnet and Judith, introducing a note of dread: Agnes’s dreams have shown two children, not three, standing at her deathbed. In more than one sense, the stage is set for tragedy.

What’s in a name? Plenty. At the beginning of “Hamnet,” a tempest of a movie from the director Chloé Zhao, we’re told that, in sixteenth-century England, the monikers Hamlet and Hamnet were used interchangeably. The premise of the film—and of Maggie O’Farrell’s novel of the same title, published in 2020—is that, after his son’s death, in 1596, Shakespeare wrote “Hamlet” in a burst of raw, unexpurgated grief. It’s a notion made for scholarly dispute: several other plays, including two comedies, “Much Ado About Nothing” and “As You Like It,” came between the death of Hamnet and the creation of “Hamlet.” Still, loss hews to no temporal logic but its own, and it would be foolish to hold O’Farrell’s unabashed historical fantasy to a persnickety standard. The more trenchant critique, surely, is that the entwining of art and life has become a tiresome conceit, predicated on the bland notion that all great fiction must have an autobiographical component and a therapeutic aim.

Zhao’s “Hamnet” does not exactly scrape the mold off these clichés, and that is fine and even fitting. If there be fungus of any kind, you can rest assured that the earthy Agnes (Jessie Buckley) will find a use for it. We first see her in a forest, curled up between the roots of a tree. Rising, she strides through the woods with a hawk on her arm and various mugwort-based remedies committed to memory. There has always been a native wildness to Buckley; in the psychological thriller “Beast” (2017), she was a creature of the Jersey coast, feral, urchinlike, perpetually smeared with mud. Here, she cuts a more serene woodland figure—pale of skin, dark of hair, and clad in rusty browns and reds. No wonder that, returning to her family’s farmhouse, she immediately transfixes William (Paul Mescal), the Latin tutor, who spies this vision of freedom and loveliness from an upstairs window and looks boxed in by comparison. Zhao emphasizes his entrapment, shooting him through glass—a studied choice, but one that contextualizes her interest in this particular story. Agnes, in her matter-of-fact harmony with the natural world, is like an Elizabethan ancestor of Zhao’s contemporary American protagonists: the melancholy Lakota horsemen of “Songs My Brothers Taught Me” (2016), a restless widow cast adrift in “Nomadland” (2020). The bookish William, meanwhile, is also recognizably a Zhao construct: as a new husband and father, struggling to write a play by candlelight, he is possessed by a stubborn sense of his vocation. No less than the gravely injured cowboy hero of “The Rider” (2017), brazenly chasing his rodeo dreams, William must do what he was born to do.

Zhao’s first three features were steeped in documentary realism, shot with a sturdy, windswept lyricism and abounding in nonprofessional actors. Then came her fourth picture, the clunky Marvel comic-book epic “Eternals” (2021)—a noble but self-evident failure, in which she channelled the visual and spiritual reveries of Terrence Malick, a longtime influence, in a vain attempt to transcend superhero-movie conventions. “Hamnet” is, inevitably, an improvement, though not exactly a return to form. It marks an unstable new mode for Zhao, a weave of subdued pastoral realism and forceful, sometimes pushy emotionalism. The movie whispers poetic sublimities in your ear one minute and tosses its prestige ambitions in your face the next.

The whiplash is disorienting, but, somewhat paradoxically, the characters’ romantic upheaval provides its own center of gravity. You are propelled alongside them as Agnes, sensing William’s creative and professional frustrations, packs him off to London to follow his dreams, hastening the pair’s descent into marital discontent and parental grief. Buckley is every inch the requisite force of nature, heaving and sweating up a storm as Agnes wrenches her children into this world, and moving swiftly from anguish to rage—a drained, defeated anger—as one of those children is yanked back out of it. Buckley and Mescal, both Irish and both bountifully gifted, have done quieter, subtler work elsewhere, though I can’t say that their histrionics miss the mark. What is “Hamnet,” or “Hamlet,” without a little ham?

O’Farrell’s novel is subtitled “A Novel of the Plague.” Its most gripping, least typical chapter describes an outbreak in breathlessly suspenseful detail, tracking the contagion from Alexandria, where a shipworker has a fateful encounter with a monkey’s fleas, all the way to England and, eventually, the Shakespeares’ doorstep. It’s no surprise that the film dispenses with this; its focus is on the domestic claustrophobia that William escapes and Agnes sacrificially endures. Agnes finds some comfort from her supportive brother Bartholomew (Joe Alwyn) and, in time, her mother-in-law, Mary (Emily Watson), who initially disapproves of Agnes but comes around to a grudging respect, rooted in shared experiences of drudgery and loss. This is Zhao’s first collaboration with the Polish cinematographer Łukasz Żal, who, in the Holocaust drama “The Zone of Interest” (2023), used an array of small hidden cameras to suggest the daily, routinized horrors of a Nazi family. “Hamnet” attempts nothing so technically virtuosic or historically queasy, and yet a not dissimilar air of home surveillance persists. Indoors, the Shakespeares are often shot unnaturally head on or in high-angled panoramas that diminish their stature. We could be studying them under glass.

Such intensity of focus may also explain why Zhao and O’Farrell have jettisoned the novel’s nonsequential narrative structure, which shuttles, quite intricately, between two parallel time frames. The film, by contrast, moves cleanly from start to finish, forgoing any impulse toward Malickian nonlinearity. Even so, Zhao remains vividly under the spell of Malick the image-maker, and also Malick the intimate observer of the everyday. She has a great eye for sunlight, especially when filtered through a woodsy canopy of green, and in the family’s happier moments she’s exquisitely attentive to the joyful chaos of Hamnet (Jacobi Jupe) and Judith (Olivia Lynes) at play. At one point, the kids pretend to be the Weird Sisters. Their father may be a fitful presence at home, but his work already has them under its spell.

But not Agnes. When Hamnet is gone, she increasingly resents her husband’s absences. This manifests itself not in fits of fury but in a silent indifference to the work that keeps William away, and we sense that “Hamnet” means to deliver a feminist corrective to the myth of male genius. But it’s a halfhearted rebuke; the movie does, in the end, give that genius its due, and with a compensatory haste that occasionally throws Mescal’s performance off balance. During rehearsals, the distracted, tormented playwright forces a young star (Noah Jupe) to run his lines ragged; later, strolling moodily along the Thames, William adopts Hamlet’s “To be, or not to be” soliloquy as his own. The play’s clearly still the thing, but its invocations here seem facile in the face of a father’s grief.

Shakespeare’s creation comes to life more effectively onstage, and with Agnes there to witness it. Until now, she has avoided the Globe like, well, the plague, and the mere act of theatregoing strikes her as alien. There’s a comic aspect to her confusion—chronic shushers will be triggered to the point of distraction—which only reveals the utterly guileless depth of Buckley’s absorption in the role. Agnes’s nescience encourages us to see “Hamlet”—staged here on a forest set that takes us back to the film’s Edenic beginning—through fresh eyes. My own, I confess, were soon blurred by tears, brought on with such diluvial force as to both quench my skepticism and reawaken it. There is, for starters, the shameless deployment of Max Richter’s “On the Nature of Daylight,” a lush track that, from “Shutter Island” (2010) to “Arrival” (2016), has grown hoary with overuse. There is, too, the inherent kitsch in reducing one of the richest, most intellectually prismatic works in English literature to an instrument of healing. “Hamlet” has been many things for many centuries; here, it is chiefly the vessel for a parent’s closure. The rigor of the text melts, thaws—and resolves itself into adieu. ♦

The British musician Dev Hynes stays booked and busy. Hynes, as accomplished an artist-curator as he is a musician, has performed in concert halls with the composer Philip Glass, written music for Broadway (in the transfer of Max Wolf Friedlich’s thriller “Job”), scored a half-dozen films (including Paul Schrader’s “Master Gardener” and Rebecca Hall’s “Passing”), and written or produced for many talented friends, on albums and accompanying art pieces. In fact, his dance card has been so full that he spent seven years away from his defining project, Blood Orange—for which he serves as singer and producer—his longest hiatus since he took up the moniker, in 2011.

Photograph by Gareth McConnell for The New Yorker

At long last, he returned in August, with “Essex Honey,” a glorious and devastating album that puts his deep connections to great use, enlisting the pop savants Lorde and Caroline Polachek, the alt-folk singer Mustafa, and the cellist Mabe Fratti, among others. He harnesses all that energy to make reflective music that seeks the head-clearing expanse of a wide-open countryside. Blood Orange plays Brooklyn Steel, Nov. 29-30 and Dec. 2-5.—Sheldon Pearce

In Charisse Pearlina Weston’s sculptures, sheets of glass are gathered into configurations of intimacy which verge on mutual destruction. Politics and history seethe from the hazardous touch of the meeting points. In the precariousness of Weston’s chosen material—and of its arrangement—she finds a metaphor for Black life, its fragile metaphysical surface, the forces that give it form. The sculptures seem to hold their breath as the tenuous question of their future hovers in the air: the image of their shattering under pressure is readily available to the mind’s eye, made even more so by regions in several sculptures where glass has already been broken, and put back together again.—Zoë Hopkins (Jack Shainman; through Dec. 20.)

New York City Ballet kicks off the season with “George Balanchine’s The Nutcracker.” For kids, there is the giant Christmas tree that grows to terrifying proportions. For even the most blasé among us, there is Tchaikovsky’s excitable score, which incorporates popular songs (“Cadet Roussel”) and the tinkling sound of the celesta—a perfect analogy for the delicacy of Sugarplum’s pointe work. Ballet aficionados can argue over whether this year’s Sugarplum, or Marzipan Shepherdess, or Candy Cane measures up to last year’s. Balanchine’s “Nutcracker” always has some little revelation to impart, which is why people return to it, again and again.—Marina Harss (David H. Koch Theatre; Nov. 28-Jan. 4.)

Isabelle Corey in “Bob le Flambeur.”

Photograph from Alamy

A highlight of Film Forum’s “Le Heist Français” series is Jean-Pierre Melville’s 1956 drama “Bob le Flambeur,” which finds melancholy romanticism in a complex criminal scheme. Bob Montagné (Roger Duchesne), an elegant middle-aged gambler in the Parisian gangland milieu, loses all his money; in desperation, he gathers a team to rob a casino, but the teamwork is hopelessly entangled with affairs of the heart. Rescuing a young woman (Isabelle Corey) from a violent pimp, Bob—acknowledging his age with bitter wisdom—pairs her off with his hotheaded protégé (Daniel Cauchy). A police inspector (Guy Decomble) whose life Bob saved long ago and a croupier (Claude Cerval) with a sharp-eyed wife (Colette Fleury) and a hidden past embody a principled vision of secret loyalties and betrayals.—Richard Brody (Nov. 21-Dec. 4.)

Back in 2012, the venerable Iranian musician Kayhan Kalhor sat on an intricately patterned rug and performed twelve minutes of bowed improvisation for NPR’s Tiny Desk series. The concert was transfixing, prompting one YouTube commenter to call him “the Paganini of Kamancheh,” the string instrument native to Iran. One Grammy win and almost fifteen years later, Kalhor takes the stage at the Town Hall for an evening of classical Persian music. He will be joined by two other virtuosos, Kiya Tabassian, on setar, and Behrouz Jamali, on tombak. Paganini may be long gone, but he’s no doubt alive in Kalhor, and these days more than ever, being transfixed by art is a welcome experience.—Jane Bua (The Town Hall; Nov. 30.)

In “Chess”—the sonically exhilarating disco-rock musical by the ABBA composers Benny Andersson and Björn Ulvaeus, with lyrics co-written by Tim Rice—an international love triangle plays proxy for Cold War tensions, narrative sense be damned. The script has been under revision since 1986, and for this stripped-down production, directed by Michael Mayer, the book writer Danny Strong takes a tongue-in-cheek swing: now the narrator, named the Arbiter (the charm-bomb Bryce Pinkham), info-dumps while making snide remarks. Does it make sense? Nyet particularly. But I tipped my king in ecstatic surrender anyway, overwhelmed by three Broadway superpowers: Aaron Tveit as the American bad boy Freddie, Lea Michele as his chess second, Florence, and Nicholas Christopher as the Russian introvert Anatoly, whose astonishing voice could bring an entire Iron Curtain down.—Helen Shaw (Imperial; open run.)

There will still be turkey in the fridge when Aimee Mann and Ted Leo play three Christmas shows at City Winery. In the twenty-tens, Mann and Leo, two long-legged dons of indie music, staged a version of Mann’s cult holiday variety show, with friends—Liz Phair reportedly sang “Why Can’t I Wreath?”—and the tradition still reigns. Under the moniker the Both, they bring together their wry, feeling, politically alive writing in delicately laminated harmonies—Leo’s hairline grooviness hand in glove with Mann’s crazily clarion alto, in which notes are always twisting from the moody to the bright. They’re joined by the comedians Josh Gondelman and Paul F. Tompkins and the singer-songwriter Nellie McKay. It’s Christmas, apparently, and not a moment too soon.—Ray Lipstein (Nov. 28-30.)

In Ethan Lipton’s surrealist “The Seat of Our Pants”—the composer’s musical adaptation of Thornton Wilder’s “The Skin of Our Teeth,” directed by Leigh Silverman—the Antrobus family survives millennia of catastrophes that are, somehow, all happening “now” in New Jersey: the Ice Age swallows suburbia; the Atlantic City boardwalk washes away in the Biblical flood. The superb Micaela Diamond cracks jokes as the family’s saucy maid, while Andy Grotelueschen plays a Garrison Keillor-esque announcer. Lipton’s wry, light-hearted treatment gives the 1942 play crucial buoyancy, removing the logier passages to reveal Wilder’s message: yea, though the “end times” may be upon us, that’s just the normal order of business for the family of man.—H.S. (Public Theatre; through Dec. 7.)

2025 was a banner year for Dijon Duenas, the singer-songwriter and producer who performs mononymously as Dijon. After spending the mid-twenty-tens in the alt-R. & B. duo Abhi//Dijon, the singer débuted solo with “Absolutely,” in 2021, cultivating a liquid soul sound. But many listeners were first exposed to him this summer, by poring over the credits for “Swag,” Justin Bieber’s comeback album. He then popped up in Paul Thomas Anderson’s riveting political thriller, “One Battle After Another,” this fall. In between those appearances, Dijon made his own statement, with “Baby,” his best album yet. The record is a quantum leap, toying with all conventional notions of style, order, and shape.—Sheldon Pearce (Brooklyn Paramount; Dec. 1-2. Terminal 5; Dec. 4.)

With “Benita,” the documentary filmmaker Alan Berliner takes on a personal project suffused with grief and regret. In 2021, the New York-based filmmaker Benita Raphan died by suicide; Raphan’s family asked Berliner, who had been an adviser on several of her films, to complete her final, unfinished project. Instead, Berliner, granted access to Raphan’s personal archive, made this candid and poignant biographical portrait. Her talent and originality were evident in childhood; after college, she started making films, confronting difficulties with financing and recognition, and also increasing pressure from mental illness. Berliner honors a fascinating artist who, with grim irony, becomes better known than ever through his memorial tribute.—R.B. (Firehouse Cinema; opens Nov. 28.)

Ringl+pit’s “Glass and Paper,” from 1931.

Photograph by ringl+pit / Courtesy Robert Mann Gallery

Grete Stern and Ellen Auerbach were in their twenties in 1930, when they opened a studio in Berlin and began collaborating under the name ringl+pit. Their work—black-and-white portraits, still-lifes, and advertising shots, some now on view at Robert Mann gallery—subverts an education in Bauhaus severity with playful, quirky Surrealism. Their speciality was sophistication with an attitude, epitomized by a portrait of Auerbach (a.k.a. pit) giving viewers a knowing side-eye from under a veil. A reserved portrait of Bertolt Brecht stands out in a group that skews decidedly sensuous, including a twisted, fleshy glove, dandelions floating in a glass of water, and a woman’s hands in a bowl of soapsuds. Ringl+pit softened the avant-garde’s serrated edge, and then added their own sort of bite.—Vince Aletti (Robert Mann; through Dec. 6.)

Illustration by Philip Lindeman

Every December, in Atlanta, for as long as I can remember, I’ve watched “A Child’s Christmas in Wales” with my parents and my younger brother. We are decidedly not Welsh. But after my mother stumbled across the 1987 TV movie, starring the British character actor Denholm Elliott, viewing it became a holiday ritual. Based on the Dylan Thomas prose poem of the same name, published in 1952, the film lovingly and mournfully depicts the boyhood Christmastime of an old Welshman, tenderly and a tad mischievously embodied by Elliott. Mustachioed firemen soak a smoky parlor, port-drunk aunts croon in the side yard, and a “clockwork mouse” zips underfoot. One line became a kind of code in my family, signifying time’s slippery passage: “I can never remember whether it snowed for six days and six nights when I was twelve, or whether it snowed for twelve days and twelve nights when I was six.”—Charles Bethea

Some thirty-five years ago, an attorney, whose clients included a captain of the Genovese crime family, decided to celebrate his lymphoma going into remission with an extravagant Christmas-light display at his home in southwest Brooklyn. His neighbors caught this fever, and it hasn’t broken. Visiting the Dyker Heights Christmas Lights will require, for most, a schlep on the D or the R train, plus a bus jaunt or a fifteen-minute walk, providing time to steel oneself for a conflagration of holiday spectacle: kick lines of animatronic nutcrackers, armies of inflatable angels, snowmen the size of giraffes. One year, my daughter, then six and reaching sensory overload, nudged her brother and me off a million-watt main drag toward a quieter side street, where we sat on a low stone wall and peered up at the murky night sky, newly appreciative of the darkness.—Jessica Winter

Me, I like to sidle up to the stereo at a Yuletide gathering—the more staid and elegant the better—play “Must Be Santa,” the most patently unhinged cut from Bob Dylan’s 2009 holiday album, “Christmas in the Heart,” and see how long it takes before someone demands that I stop. (Spoiler alert: I very rarely make it to the end of the song.) On a slightly more earnest note, I also find myself making a Christmastime habit of reaching out to friends who have lost people, whether it was just earlier this year, or several decades ago—the holidays can be a wildly fraught and stark reminder of the passage of time. There are no consolations to offer the grieving, really, but a squeeze of the hand, or a text, or a phone call, or a card in the mail can be transformative. I remind myself to not be shy about bringing grief up—after all, there’s a good chance it’s already in the room.—Amanda Petrusich

My family is from the Czech Republic on one side and Italy on the other. In terms of holiday cuisine, the Italian side wins out like a dominant gene. Every Christmas Eve, my parents, in Connecticut, celebrate with enormous plates of antipasto, requiring pounds of cured meats, aged provolone, fresh mozzarella, and Sicilian olives composed into layer cakes with lettuce and shaved fennel. For decades now, those raw materials have been acquired from Panino Italian Gourmet, an unassuming deli on the side of the highway in Brewster, New York. It’s a family operation that started in Queens fifty years ago; the original matriarch runs the register while her two sons man the slicers. Traditionally, my younger brother and I hit Panino on December 23rd, sort out the meat-and-cheese order, then add sandwiches for the ride home. I suggest the Italian Flag, with mozzarella, roasted peppers, and broccoli rabe—but add prosciutto. As Grandpa Alfonse would say, bellissimo.—Kyle Chayka

Christmas in London starts perilously early. Every year, deep in the city’s financial district, a spectacular tree-lighting ceremony occurs at one of London’s oldest covered markets. Dating back to the fourteenth century, Leadenhall Market stands on the ruins of Roman Londinium. In the Victorian era, it was a well-known place to buy poultry, and it is likely where Scrooge picked up his turkey in “A Christmas Carol.” Today, it’s full of bougie coffee shops and pubs popular among men wearing blue button-downs. In November, a buzzing crowd gathers under the market’s iron arches to watch the towering tree as it lights up. There’s mulled wine, fake snow, and a band jazzy enough to make you forget that Christmas is still more than a month away.—Anna Russell

P.S. Good stuff on the internet:

• Hilary Duff loves mahjong
• A realistic morning routine
• Get into the discourse

The best thing about the 2024 movie “Wicked” was that it ended. After some two and a half hours of dubious “Wizard of Oz” revisionism, stolidly antifascist politics, and digitally shellacked song-and-dance spectacle, the director Jon M. Chu brought the curtain down on a high note. Soaring on a broomstick over the Emerald City, Elphaba Thropp (Cynthia Erivo)—green of flesh, pointy of hat, unfailingly pure of heart—ascended to the peak of her magical powers and struck fear into her enemies. “I’m flying high, defying gravity!” she sang, while also flying in the faces of the Wizard of Oz (Jeff Goldblum), a totalitarian humbug, and her complicit frenemy, Glinda (Ariana Grande), a woman with the pastel-pink stylings and the moral courage of a frosted cupcake. Elphaba became the Wicked Witch of the West, a convenient scapegoat for a fearmongering authoritarian regime. What a world, what a world. The End.

If only. The source material here is the long-running stage musical “Wicked,” which was itself an artificially sweetened adaptation of Gregory Maguire’s far darker 1995 novel, “Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West.” On Broadway, it took two and a half hours, plus a fifteen-minute intermission, for the show to disgorge its story—an elaborate, through-a-witch’s-eye prequel to the classic L. Frank Baum novel “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz” and its immortal 1939 film adaptation. But, in reshaping “Wicked” for the screen, Chu and the screenwriters Winnie Holzman (who wrote the book for the show) and Dana Fox decided that more would be more. Defying brevity, they cleaved the movie into two parts—“Wicked: Part I” and the newly arrived “Wicked: For Good”—effectively doubling the running time to five hours and stretching the intermission to the length of a year.

Such acts of cine-mitosis are hardly new in Hollywood, with a two-part “Dune” adaptation and a two-part “Mission: Impossible” adventure among the most recent examples. Are these choices driven by art, commerce, or a sliding-scale combination of the two? The “Wicked” split, at least, reeked of mercenary foolishness from the start, especially for those who recall how front-loaded the show’s meagre pleasures were. “Part I,” whatever its missteps, delivered those pleasures capably enough. It gave us Erivo and Grande, as well-matched as pistachio and cherry, and sufficiently full-throated to deliver fine new renditions of “Defying Gravity” and “Popular,” the show’s two standout songs, written by the composer and lyricist Stephen Schwartz. Chu, who cut his teeth on the “Step Up” franchise, handled the large-scale musical elements of “Wicked” with a sense of showmanship. And the ensemble-juggling skills that he honed on “Crazy Rich Asians” (2018) served him well amid the cheeky shenanigans at Shiz University, Oz’s leading school of sorcery, where Elphaba, a bookish pariah, squared off with the beloved but less gifted Glinda.

In “Wicked: For Good,” school days are very much a thing of the past. The Wizard has gone full dictator—a turn that Goldblum underplays drolly, with a sinister little “Can’t we get along?” shrug—and the consequences prove especially harsh for lions and tigers and bears. Once upon a time, the animals of Oz enjoyed equal rights with humans, including the power of speech, but most have now been struck dumb and either locked up or exiled. These Orwellian developments, like nearly everything else in the film, land with a self-serious clatter: “This is not the Oz I know,” Elphaba laments, springing critters from cages at every opportunity. She even frees the Wizard’s winged monkeys, which, more cursed than blessed by the gift of flight, have become a troop of wrathful shriekers. Not to be out-fumed, Michelle Yeoh returns, in a burst of hocus-pocus semaphore and bird-attack coiffure, as the Wizard’s most ruthless ally. Helpfully, she goes by the name Madame Morrible. (Was Crazy Witch Asian deemed too unsubtle?)

As part of an anti-Wicked Witch of the West smear campaign, Morrible tries to ensnare the loyalties of Elphaba’s closest ex-classmates: Glinda, a smiling yet conflicted mascot for the Oztocracy, and the dashing Prince Fiyero (Jonathan Bailey), now captain of the Wizard’s guard. But Fiyero’s heart belongs to Elphaba, and, even as he and Glinda are pressured into a very public engagement, the air is thick with political and emotional subterfuge. Theirs is not the only romantic complication afoot. For my taste, too much of “Wicked: For Good” plays like “Oz the World Turns,” though I’d credit most daytime soap operas with superior production values. Why is everything in this movie, for all its lavishly gilded, emerald-studded set design, either too dim or too bright—so blindingly backlit that Oz seems to be under perpetual thermonuclear attack, or so murky that you could scarcely tell a monkey from a Munchkin?

Munchkinland, as it happens, is now governed by Elphaba’s younger sister, Nessarose (Marissa Bode), who does not share her sibling’s ironclad integrity. Nessarose uses a wheelchair, and one of the most wretched aspects of “Wicked: For Good” is its conflation of physical disability and soul-crushing bitterness. Nessarose has been given nothing else to express; she’s clingy, thwarted jealousy personified. She resents Elphaba for her rebellion, just as she resents Boq (Ethan Slater), a Munchkin she loves, for abandoning her to pursue Glinda. Boq’s surname, by the way, is Woodsman, and you needn’t be an Ozphile to sense the grim direction in which all this is headed. Just follow the yellow brick road.

This, as far as I can tell, is why “Wicked: For Good” exists: so that the events of Baum’s novel and the 1939 film, forever conjoined in the public imagination, can be maneuvered into position. But must they be maneuvered so clumsily, and with such a glaring absence of brains or heart? In time, we will be introduced to Dorothy Gale—cue a few flashes of gingham—and force-fed origin stories for her travelling companions, which range from the nonsensically contrived to the gratuitously traumatizing. (Even if your children can stomach the Tin Man’s arrival, the Scarecrow’s cornfield crucifixion might be the last straw.) Onstage, all this narrative retconning has a breezy behind-the-scenes cleverness, as if the story were being slyly fleshed out in the margins. Onscreen, and on full display, it’s close to an abomination—a travesty of fairy-tale logic and pop-cultural memory. By the time Dorothy and her friends march on Elphaba’s lair, there seems to be something more pernicious than mere mediocrity at work. It’s as if the picture were so cowed by its iconic predecessor that it could only respond with a petulant urge to destroy the classic it could never be.

Maguire’s novel was itself written in the spirit of a corrective; it aimed to bring a morally ambiguous modernism and a grownup, forthright sexuality to bear on Baum’s squeaky-clean demarcations of good and evil. But on the carnal front, at least, the musical is made of softer stuff. The less said the better about Elphaba and Fiyero’s drippy seduction number (“Somehow I’ve fallen / under your spell / And somehow I’m feeling / it’s up that I fell”), or about what passes, miserably, for pillow talk: “You’re beautiful,” Fiyero coos, and, when Elphaba accuses him of lying, he replies, “It’s not lying. It’s looking at things in another way.” How’s that for flattery?

Some legitimate passion does erupt when Elphaba and Glinda, reunited by tragedy, let their long-simmering rivalry bubble over in a wand-versus-broomstick smackdown. Which witch emerges victorious—not just from that catfight but from the whole of this busy, confused, hopelessly mangled movie? I’d say the film is fortunate to have them both. In the first installment, Erivo made common decency feel dramatic; here, it’s satisfying to see Elphaba in aggressive defiance of the Wizard’s regime. Grande, too, has come into her own. After her delicate comic high jinks in “Part I,” she has the trickier task of expressing Glinda’s first real experience of rejection and disillusionment. “It’s time for her bubble to pop,” she sings of herself, in a quavering ballad—one of two new songs, neither memorable, that Schwartz wrote for the film. This rare moment of self-awareness arrives at perhaps the least opportune time: Glinda is in her luxurious tower room, watching from on high as the Emerald City descends into chaos.

It’s tone-deaf but honest. “Wicked: For Good” is littered with references to the idiot masses of Oz—their gullibility, their venality, their stupidity. Elphaba uses this as justification for why she must ultimately sacrifice herself and become a public symbol of evil incarnate: as she tells Glinda, “They need someone to be wicked, so that you can be good.” The Wizard espouses his own version of this idea, confident that the public can be appeased by the illusion of a common enemy. The cynicism, although hardly misplaced, feels thoroughly unearned. The “Wicked” movies never convince us—in the way that “The Wizard of Oz” or Walter Murch’s darkly thrilling “Return to Oz” (1985) convinced us—of the fantastical reality of Oz as an actual place. Chu and his screenwriters evince no curiosity about the history, culture, and politics of the realm, or even about the potential stakes of the people’s capitulation to the Wizard’s fascism. The citizens of Oz are treated as no more than an undifferentiated crowd of extras, an ignorant and finally disposable monolith. The movie’s flattery of the audience, and of our supposedly superior conscience, is an expression of the same contempt. ♦

On Thursday morning, not long after entering Washington National Cathedral for the funeral of Dick Cheney, I ran into Rachel Maddow. She gave me a hug. A couple of minutes earlier, a starstruck usher had told me that the iconic liberal TV host was in attendance, though I hadn’t quite believed it. But then, yes, there she was. I got a hug from Rachel Maddow at Dick Cheney’s funeral. Cue the pigs flying. Hell may not yet have frozen over, but on an overcast November morning in Donald Trump’s besieged capital, there were moments when it seemed like it might have.

Trump’s takeover of the Republican Party—the Party that Cheney had loved and served until Trump, finally, caused him to walk away from it—has been a decade in the making. But there can be no better summing up of the reordering of our politics in this era than the scene on Thursday in that lovely church where Washington marks the passing of its giants. On hand to say goodbye to the former Vice-President, who shaped the post-9/11 world with a belief in the unchecked exercise of American power, making him perhaps the most divisive figure in public life until Trump himself, were Nancy Pelosi and Dan Quayle, Mitch McConnell and Adam Schiff, James Carville and Karl Rove. Joe Biden took the Amtrak down from Delaware, even though it was his eighty-third birthday. Kamala Harris sat in the front row next to Mike Pence. Waiting for the service to begin, I exchanged pleasantries with Al Gore and Margaret Tutwiler and Elliott Abrams and a lot of other people whose names one used to read in the newspaper back when people read newspapers.

Absent entirely was Trump or any senior members from his Administration. The sitting Vice-President, J. D. Vance, was not invited. The Republican Speaker of the House, where Cheney served for ten years as a congressman from Wyoming, did not show. This was how Cheney would have wanted it to be. He could not have been prouder in his final years to have followed his daughter Liz out the door of the Party that chose Trump’s lies about the election of 2020 over the plain truth of his defeat. As a result, the cathedral was not completely full, the way it would have been if our city and our country were not so riven by discord, but it was not anywhere near empty, either. Politics moves on; alliances shift. You can fill a very large room with people who have not forgiven Cheney for the Iraq War but who were nonetheless sad to see the passing of a man who dared to speak out about Trump. So many of the former Vice-President’s fellow-Republicans agreed with him privately and said nothing publicly.

“I can’t believe we got Dick Cheney in the national divorce,” someone said as I was walking in. Why were they—we—all there? To see who else was, for sure. It’s still Washington. To remember? Of that, I’m less certain.

I’ve covered a number of these grand National Cathedral sendoffs in the course of this long Trump era. The first such, that of John McCain, in September of 2018, felt like a meeting of the resistance, a clarion call to take up arms where the late senator, another Republican who turned apostate rather than submit to Trump, had left them on the field. It was a shock to see the President’s daughter Ivanka and his son-in-law Jared Kushner in attendance, presenting themselves as envoys to an establishment that neither wanted nor acknowledged their intrusion. In hindsight, though, it was a simpler time. Now we know what we didn’t then, which is that there would come a point when they would stop wanting to crash the party and that that would be the real sign of how much trouble we’re in.

Most recently, in January, there was the state funeral for Jimmy Carter. All the former Presidents were there, and the shock then was seeing Barack Obama being chatted up by Trump and gamely laughing in response—a veneer of normalcy that seemed at odds with the death glares coming from various other, resolutely silent dignitaries sitting near them. Was this how it would be now, I wondered, with our previous leaders just pretending everything would somehow be O.K.?

Nine months later, no one is pretending anymore. On Thursday morning, as the mourners were filing into the cathedral, Trump sent out nineteen posts on his social-media platform fulminating about a recent video made by Democratic members of Congress urging military personnel not to obey unlawful orders they might receive from the Trump Administration. This, Trump insisted, was “SEDITIOUS BEHAVIOR, punishable by DEATH!” Another post he shared proposed the means by which they should die. “HANG THEM,” he declared. “GEORGE WASHINGTON WOULD!”

Perhaps because I was reading these posts on my phone at the funeral service for Liz Cheney’s father, I immediately thought of the threats Trump had issued against her during last year’s campaign. Days before the election, he told Tucker Carlson that she should be put in front of a firing squad and shot. Trump is who he is. “He can never be trusted with power again,” the former Vice-President warned when he endorsed Harris. Right now, unfortunately for the nation and the world, Trump is proving to be every bit the threat that Cheney warned us about.

If Cheney was right about Trump, he was not correct about many other things—most consequentially, of course, that the United States needed to invade Iraq in 2003 and depose Saddam Hussein to stop the nuclear-weapons program that Saddam did not have. As far as I know, Cheney never apologized for this, nor for any of the other costly, deadly excesses of that era that he advocated.

At Thursday’s funeral, this complicated record was not even mentioned. I never heard the words “Iraq” or “terrorism,” or “Trump” for that matter. The attack on 9/11 that so defined the George W. Bush Administration in which Cheney served was brought up by only a single speaker—not President Bush but Cheney’s cardiologist, Jonathan Reiner, who had had an appointment with him at the White House that day.

Even when Liz Cheney spoke, she barely alluded to the eventful, contentious life in the public eye that her father had led. There was one rebuke in there, for the absent President who, since rising to power, has so consistently chosen partisanship over country. Not like her dad, she insisted. “He knew the bonds of party must always yield to the single bond we share as Americans,” she said. “For him a choice between defense of the Constitution and defense of your political party was no choice at all.”

But that was it. And so, with most of the controversies that shadowed Cheney’s life left largely unacknowledged, it was hard to know exactly what to think. Still, everything about the service seemed carefully chosen, including the music to whose strains Richard Bruce Cheney—former Vice-President and, as his granddaughter Grace so lovingly called him, rodeo grandpa—left the cathedral. It was “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” and I have little doubt that Liz Cheney wants us all to know that her father’s truth, whatever it was, will go marching on.

When I walked up the hill to the cathedral on Thursday morning, I had expected the service to be a flashback, a reminder of Washington as it was in the Bush years that now seem so very long ago. But as I left, nearly bumping into Nancy Pelosi as I walked down the stairs, I realized that Cheney’s service had not been a portal to the past. Because there is no past in which Rachel Maddow would have attended Dick Cheney’s funeral. Watching her chatting away before the service, inches from where John Bolton was sitting—that was the present. Because it is only in the present—this cursed, bizarre, Trumpian present—in which such a scene could have been possible. ♦

At the start of the extraordinary German drama “Sound of Falling,” a teen-ager, Erika (Lea Drinda), hobbles down a hall on one leg and a pair of crutches. It takes a second to realize that she has no disability; she has used a length of rope to tuck her left leg out of sight. The crutches belong to her uncle Fritz (Martin Rother), an amputee, who is asleep in his bedroom when she sneaks in to return them. Actually, he’s only feigning sleep: though his eyes are closed, he’s undoubtedly awake as she approaches his bed, studies his bare chest, and touches his navel. From these opening moments, the film is punctuated by spasms of youthful curiosity—about the strange properties of one’s body, and the forbidden feel of someone else’s—and also by wicked games of cunning and deceit. In a later scene, two sisters giggle as they nail a servant’s unattended shoes to the floor. A woman, heading out on an errand, finds that her husband has somehow wedged her car between two trees—a cruel practical joke, and on her birthday, no less.

The Berlin-born director Mascha Schilinski, who wrote the screenplay with Louise Peter, is a bit of a prankster herself. It’s been a while since I’ve seen a filmmaker wield the tools of her craft with such an ingenious and committed sense of mischief. “Sound of Falling,” which won a Jury Prize at Cannes, and is Germany’s submission for Best International Feature at the Oscars, is both disorienting and enveloping; it knocks you off your feet and then sweeps you up again. In an early sequence, Alma (Hanna Heckt), a young girl with pale blond braids, squeals and runs with her sisters from room to room. The camera joins in the chase, pursuing them in a lengthy single take—and then, without cutting, deposits Alma, and us, in a different scene altogether. Her playmates have vanished, and the home has fallen eerily quiet. Alma peers through a keyhole and spies her mother (Susanne Wuest) standing before a candlelit shrine to the family’s dead. We are lost in a labyrinth of time and memory, and the narrative ground beneath our feet is alarmingly unstable. In an instant, the carefree exhilaration of children at play can give way to the sombre hush of tragedy.

Alma lives in a large, cavernous farmhouse in northern Germany that is both a hide-and-seeker’s playground and a voyeur’s delight. Doors are forever being left ajar; every keyhole is an invitation to snoop. The camera, controlled by the cinematographer Fabian Gamper, is invariably in motion; it peers through cracks, rushes down hallways, glides through a barn, and, in occasional dreamlike interludes, simulates the faded colors and blurred textures of old home movies. The film never strays from the house and its environs—the farthest it ventures is a nearby river, where the characters sometimes go to picnic and swim.

The most significant distances in “Sound of Falling” are not physical but temporal. Schilinski slips freely from one time frame to the next, without warning and without contextualizing specifics. We learn to read the film’s chronology through visual details: faces become anchoring images, as do elements of wardrobe and production design. Alma, growing up near the turn of the twentieth century, lights her way in the darkness with candles. Erika, who uses a kerosene lamp, is living through the nineteen-forties. Eventually, we realize that Erika and Alma are related, though they never share a scene; the most significant bridge between them is Fritz, who is Alma’s older brother (and is played, as a young lad, by Filip Schnack). A largely silent, peripheral presence, Fritz is consigned to his bedroom in Erika’s story, but through Alma’s eyes we see how he lost his leg in the first place: their parents deliberately maimed him, so as to keep him from being conscripted during the First World War.

Decades later, in the eighties, we meet Erika’s niece Angelika (Lena Urzendowsky), a bespectacled, dark-haired teen-ager, growing up in what is now the German Democratic Republic. She casts longing glances toward the river—West Germany, and a different life, lie somewhere beyond. Angelika exudes a precocious sexual awareness, and she notices the creepy stares she gets from her uncle Uwe (Konstantin Lindhorst) and her cousin Rainer (Florian Geißelmann), even if they seem to have no idea. “I often pretended I didn’t notice how they looked at me,” Angelika says, in voice-over. “But it was actually me who was secretly watching them looking at me.” Her present-day counterpart, an adolescent named Lenka (Laeni Geiseler), soon learns to do the same in the face of male attention.

There is power in unspoken knowledge, Schilinski suggests, and the performance of innocence and naiveté, for a young girl, can be an instrument of subversion. But the movie doesn’t fall into a blandly homogenizing trap; it knows that each era holds horrors all its own. It is little Alma who explains, with chilling incomprehension, her family’s routine practice of sterilizing the help: a maid, she tells us, was briefly sent away to be “made safe for the men.” On rare occasions, a voice from one chapter will comment on events from another. Angelika notes that, after the end of the Second World War, many young women like Erika headed to the river to drown themselves. “They feared what might come more than they feared death,” she says. “Sound of Falling” is, in part, about how tragedies and traumas reverberate across the generations. Over the course of a century, the untimely deaths of at least three girls are recorded; a fourth disappears and is never seen again. Sexual abuse is a quietly tolerated scourge. Characters dream of running, of escaping, of becoming someone else entirely.

These are heavy subjects, marshalled in service of a potentially deterministic thesis: you might shudder to think what a director like Michael Haneke, a master of punitive art-house formalism, would have done with the same set of characters and themes. (Alma’s mother, mirthless and severely coiffed, could have been piped in directly from “The White Ribbon,” Haneke’s icy drama about a northern German village on the eve of the First World War.) Schilinski goes in the opposite direction, with a countervailing lightness of touch. It’s as if she wanted to avoid the usual cinematic expressions of violence, which by now produce only a benumbed indifference, and to suggest the habitual brutalization of women without depicting it onscreen. In training us to orient ourselves, moment by moment, she stimulates the viewer’s mind into a heightened state of alertness and feeling. It’s a brilliant instinct—and “Sound of Falling,” for all its intricate premeditation, feels entirely instinctual.

The German title of Schilinski’s film is “In die Sonne schauen,” which translates as “Looking Into the Sun.” It’s not a title with an obvious interpretation, though it did make me remember a scene in which Angelika tries to get her mother, Irm (Claudia Geisler-Bading), to locate her blind spot—a physical exercise with a clear metaphorical application. Irm is an anxious, self-conscious, fearful woman, and Geisler-Bading gives the film’s most subtly wrenching performance; her character seems permanently out of synch with the world, unable to look past her own unhappiness. Angelika, by contrast, is farsighted enough to put words to this condition: “You only ever see others from the outside, but never yourself.”

The English-language title presents even more of a mystery. In one scene, when a young girl takes a fatal tumble from a hayloft, the sound cuts out entirely. Is the sound of falling merely silence? The words bring to mind the classic riddle about whether a tree, falling in the forest, makes a sound if no one is around to hear it. The film might be posing another version of the same question: Can we feel the joy, sorrow, confusion, and anguish of those who have come before us, even if they were never with us? Could our own feelings, in fact, be the psychic residue of those long-ago experiences?

Perhaps that is why “Sound of Falling” so frequently resembles a ghost story—why the farmhouse feels so indelibly haunted, and why the camera seems to drift between rooms and time frames with the whispery grace of an apparition. Schilinski leans into the spookiness. Her film is unapologetically obsessed with death, and it invites us to look, more than once, on the faces and bodies of the dead. The director seems especially fascinated by the early twentieth century’s farewell rituals, suffused with religion and superstition. A deceased great-grandmother has stones placed over her eyes, to ease her timely passage through the afterlife. Alma’s older sister Lia (Greta Krämer), gone far too soon, has her eyes sewn open—and is then posed, sitting upright, for a family photograph.

Our own age is so oversaturated with visual media that it’s a bit startling to be reminded of an era when the significance of such images—of material evidence that one’s loved ones existed—could hardly be taken for granted. Alma cannot shake one photograph in particular: a portrait of another late sister, who died before our Alma was born. She was also named Alma, and they share an astonishing physical resemblance. Could they be, in fact, the same soul, one that has now passed through two different bodies? Schilinski, ever the trickster, isn’t saying. But even her most impish conceits are undergirded by a fundamental conviction, a belief in the power of art to wake the dead. ♦